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This story is from the category Artificial Intelligence
Date posted: 05/06/2008 University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers have built a robotic arm that can approach unfamiliar objects such as scissors, garden shears, and jointed wooden toys, and learn how they work by pushing on them and observing how they change. A step towards robots that can actually operate other devices, the UMan, or UMass Mobile Manipulator uses the same explore and see approach used by small children. Like a child forming a memory, UMan then stores this knowledge of how the objects move as a ?kinematic model? which can be used to perform specific tasks, such as opening scissors and shears to a 90 degree angle. ?Robots in factories perform complex tasks with ease, but one screw out of place can shut down the entire assembly line,? says Dov Katz, a doctoral student of computer science, and one of the robot's creators. ?Giving robots the same skills as humans turned out to be much more difficult than we imagined, which is why we don?t have robots working in unstructured environments like homes.? The key was giving the UMan eyes in the form of a digital camera that sits on the wrist. Once they added the camera, which coupled manipulating objects with the ability to ?see,? the complex computer algorithms needed to instruct the UMan to perform specific tasks became much simpler. See the full Story via external site: www.sciencedaily.com Most recent stories in this category (Artificial Intelligence): 03/03/2017: Application of Fuzzy Logic Teaches Drones to land on Moving Targets |
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